April 3, 2012

This is pretty old news now. For most Android users, your Play Store should have already been updated. Somehow, my Play Store update took longer and only today did I realize the change. It looks like the changes so far are mainly cosmetic, with the biggest improvements coming to the “My Applications” interface and reviews.

Changes to “My Applications”

New “My Applications” tabs called “Installed” and “All”. “Installed” is essentially the old view, where you can see all of the applications currently installed on your device, while the “All” display let’s you see your installation history. This could be handy when trying to recall the name of an app you downloaded last month, for example. Purchased apps have now been moved to the “All” tab, rather than being a sub-section of “Installed” as they were previously.

Review Filtering

A very welcome addition is the ability to filter application reviews in the same way you can do on the web version of Google Play. Users can now select to sort and limit reviews by a number of different criteria, such as which version of the application the review was written for or what device the reviewer was running. Being able to sort reviews by device means you can read only the reviews which are relevant to your specific hardware, a very helpful feature in the often confusingly varied world of Android devices. In addition, you can also select to sort reviews either chronologically or in order of how useful the community found them. The latter option should help weed out some of the troll comments popular applications seem to collect.

So this is the Google Play Store update. I'm sure most users already have their Play Store updated by now, if you haven't you may have to wait a little while longer.

C or alternatively known as C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control is action, mystery and super-power anime revolving around money. It seems a bit absurd for a anime, but somehow it is actually quite entertaining.

Synopsis:

The Japanese government was rescued from the brink of financial collapse by the Sovereign Wealth Fund. For its citizens, however, life has not improved, and unemployment, crime, suicide, and despair are rampant. Kimimaro, raised by his maternal grandmother after the disappearance of his father and the death of his mother, is a scholarship student whose only dream is to avoid all this and live a stable life. One day, however, he meets a man who offers him a large sum of money if he'll agree to pay it back. From then on his fate is radically altered as he's drawn into a mysterious area known as "The Financial District."

Review:

I was actually quite skeptical at how this anime world turn out since I have never encountered such a story before. A story revolving around the economy, the finance of countries and the power of money used in them. It seems all quite ambiguous to what is actually happening at first, but then reality hit me, money was the central point here. Basically, the whole anime is about the issue of having not enough money, having too much money, a person's attitude about money and how a person values that money. In the end, using "The Financial District" as like a battle ground and credit cards as 'summon cards' is quite an interest concept. I found it intriguing at most.

The art was above average as your typical shounen super power anime. The visuals were great and the battles were interesting. The variety of 'Assets' were also a bonus that made this anime more fascinating to watch. Of course, the anime is far from realistic but the special effects within the "Financial District" and their effects on the real world is just a amazing spectacular to watch. Disappearing humans and degrading environments plays an important factor here as well.

The voice acting was pretty average. Not so amazing but not so boring. You could say that the theme songs are pretty decent though. Overall, I have nothing major to complain about, just that they could have done the theme songs a bit better.

Well, since this anime heavily focused on the world and money, I did not really get to look into the character's background closely. There was one episode that did explain a bit better of the main character's backgrounds but that was a bit irrelevant to the story. Well, I wished the anime was much longer than just 13 episodes. I felt that much needed information was left out and there too many gaps throughout the anime as such, I did not feel a connection with the characters. The 'Assets' were an interesting concept to combine into the story because it made the battles more interesting.

Overall, I quite liked this anime although I wouldn't say it is on my top anime list. I felt that it lacked a lot of information and it didn't smoothly transition from one scene to the next. It felt that it was edited too quickly. Well, that is just my opinion. If you are not that interested into stories of anime then the action should be enough to keep you going to the end. The battles are decent and the varied 'Assets' just keeps it going. In the end, it is really up to you if you liked this anime or not.

STORY: 6
Interesting concept but executed poorly. Much missing information which leads to many holes in the story.

ART: 6
Decent art with some nice special effect.

SOUND: 6
Theme songs were average. Voice acting was average as well.

CHARACTER: 7
The 'Assets' were interesting. I did not feel any connections with the characters.

ENJOYMENT: 7
It's an interesting concept that should have been executed better.

OVERALL: 7
Well, even though the story had many holes, I still enjoyed the action and variety of characters. I wished that it could have been executed better.